Is Fortnite shutting down? Of course not

Thanks to a certain UK tabloid, you may have come across a rumour that Fortnite Battle Royale is shutting down due to claims of copyright infringement by PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds.

Look at all the things Epic are planning for the game they’re supposedly about to kill in our Fortnite update tracker.

The tabloid in question – among many other outlets – picked up on this story by Twinfinite, which says the rumour was started by “an image of an alleged tweet from the official Fortnite Twitter account.” Here’s their quotation of that tweet:

“Due to the law suit against PubG on copyright infringement. We are sorry to inform you that Fortnite Battle Royale Will be coming to an end May 24, 2018. Save the world will still be in development and we will roll out ASAP. Thank you all for the support.”

Obviously, this is rife with spelling and grammatical errors, a lawsuit would have to beagainst Epic rather than PUBG to cause them to take their game down,and even a cursory glance atthe real Fortnite Twitteraccount shows no sign of such a tweet having been sent. Indeed, it’s tweeting about forthcoming updates, so clearly Epic have no plans to take the game down.

The earliest image of the offending tweet that we’ve been able to find is here on Snopes.com, and is dated April 10. That’s a few days after PUBG Corp really did file suit against two “substantially similar” mobile battle royale games, and just one daybeforeFortnite’s servers went down for sudden “emergency maintenance,” so perhaps that explains the traction that this obvious hoax gained.